Comment by lmf4lol
1 day ago
I am using Firefox for years now. It's such a splendid experience.
I can recommend the following extensions:
- Youtube Enhancer
- DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials
- Cookie Auto Decline (a MUST for Europeans)
- Slop Evader
- No Gender (a MUST for Germans)
Its a totally different browsing experience than what most people have.
I recently watched my kiddo looking something up with Edge on her laptop. I had to interfere and install Firefox. It was ridicolous!!! The amount of spam on the screen. How people can cope with this is beyond me. Especially if the solution doesn't cost anything. Just Firefox + some free extensions.
edit: because people asked about the No Gender extension:
Germany didn't have “gendered” language, until it was introduced some years ago.
Imagine the sentence: The teachers explain to their pupiles that the managers work only for the shareholders.
in regular German, it would translate to:
Die Lehrer erklärten den Schülern, dass die Manager ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber arbeiten.
In gendered German, it became:
Die Lehrer:innen erklärten den Schüler:innen, dass die Manager:innen ausschliesslich für die Anteilhaber:innen arbeiten.
For me, it ruins the reading experience.
For me the most important extension is uBlock Origin. It's worth switching to Firefox for this alone.
Without your ublock origin browsing the net is quite horrible these days
Youtube is virtually unwatchable without it. I honestly have no idea how most people cope. Truth is, even with an adblocker there's so much rubbish on the page that gets in my way. Invidous is much better but it's too unreliable.
Sites that autoplay a video, which follows you as you scroll are the worst.
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Or for real control, uMatrix (yes there are madmen like me still stubbornly hanging on)
that + NoScript. That latter is a must for me.
Firefox added split view where you can look at two (or more) webpages side by side. This is a lifesaver when you have to fill up a form looking up stuff from another page!
Isn’t this kind of the job of the OS windowing system? It’s maybe slightly nicer to share the window chrome for two tabs but it’s not like looking at two browser tabs in parallel was impossible before.
Yes, and both Windows and MacOS have features to put things side by side... but they're not very intuitive and may require multiple inputs to achieve what the browser(s) do with one or two presses. On MacOS you have to long-press the "maximize" button, for example. I forgot that was a thing before reading this actually, but then I use the third-party tool Rectangle for window management.
Sure, but this is a lot nicer because when they are separate windows, and you have more windows, and if you have to alt-tab to check something else, it is a bit flow-breaking to bring these exact two windows back on top.
Yes, but they are grouped under one single tab, so for me at least is more easy to alt-tab to other app and return to the split view.
Chrome does this split-screen. Web browsers are operating systems, for all intents & purposes.
Ask any Emacs evangelist.
I love my emacs brothers and sisters but yea. If you are running docker emacs and a web browser you basically have 4 OSs running at the same time
Can you explain what the "No Gender" extension is about and why it is a must?
It removes gender speech (Leser*innen becomes Leser), which can be awkward and hurt the reading flow.
It seems like you would lose meaning by automatically replacing words, no? Why would you want to censor your internet experience, just because you find someone else's use of language awkward?
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Doesn't really seem like a MUST then...
I edited my comment to include an answer to your question.
I'd like to know too. I struggled to understand the description of the extension - is it an anti-woke thing, or some sort of modern approach to German removing the traditional (i.e. non-political) genderisation of some words, or both, or something else?
Example: Reader
In German: Leser (masculine)
Possible forms of inclusive speech: Leser*innen, Leser:in, Leser_innen
This extension removes these possible forms of inclusive speech. Arguably they hurt the reading flow and the German language has the generic masculine. However, proponents of inclusive speech feel that the generic masculine isn't inclusive.
A bit of both? Imagine every time you read the word "actor", it is instead spelled something like "actor:ress", or "actor_ress", or "actor*ress" (because the separator hasn't been standardised).
Personally I'm in favour of it, but I will concede that if it's done enough times throughout the text (as German has way more gendered nouns in common use than English) it does come with the downside of breaking the reading flow.
The first. In German, many words that refer to a person (e.g. Fahrer/Fahrerin, male/female driver) have a plural which is identical to the male singular. For a while now, many writers have used a typographic style to make the plural gender-neutral by writing the male plural, an asterisk, and then the female plural suffix (e.g. Fahrer*innen).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_star
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- Ublock origin - decentraleyes
Extensions are a vector for vulnerabilities and malware though. Its happened many times already.
Computers are a vector for vulnerabilities and malware. We must all stop using them.